Columbus Schools superintendent will retire by July 2013

Columbus school attendance scandal

Columbus City Schools employees -- and perhaps others in schools throughout the state -- are accused of falsifying students' records to improve their schools' standing on state report cards. Read the complete series.

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Columbus Superintendent Gene Harris announced this afternoon that she will retire by July 2013.

The surprise move follows statements by Harris only nine months ago that she had no plans to
leave, and would serve out her $192,000-a-year contract until it expired in mid-2014.

Since then, her administration has become the center of a major attendance scandal in which
administrators altered millions of student records in an apparent bid to boost state performance
ratings.

Harris said she won’t step down right away. Harris announced her retirement this afternoon at
the King Arts Complex on the Near East Side.

In a statement sent out after her announcement, Harris pointed out that she asked the state
auditor's office to investigate whether Columbus school employees improperly altered
student-attendance data. The Auditor of State launched a statewide probe in July after data
tampering allegations were made in Columbus; the district’s internal auditor has been investigating
the matter since at least August 2011.

"I plan to see it through and to get this challenge behind us before I leave, in July," her
statement said.

The state auditor hasn’t announced findings yet, but the internal auditor has found dozens of
students in the past couple of years who were inexplicably withdrawn and then re-enrolled, which
meant their test scores did not count toward schools’ state ratings. One of Harris’ top-level
administrators is suspended with pay in relation to the matter; another was reassigned to another
job that doesn’t deal with student data.

Harris, a Columbus native and graduate of Linden-McKinley High School, has spent most of her
career in the Columbus district. Except for a brief time at the Ohio Department of Education,
Harris worked only in Columbus schools, including as a teacher, an assistant principal, a principal
and deputy superintendent. She was hired as superintendent in 2001.

She’s one of the nation’s longest-tenured urban superintendents and was named 2012 Ohio
Superintendent of the Year by the Buckeye Association of School Administrators.

“I can think in my career in Ohio of few individuals who have contributed to education for a
length of time that Dr. Harris has. And the significant contribution she’s made to being deeply
concerned for children whose lives and conditions can be improved by public education seems to have
been her highest priority,” said Bart Anderson, the superintendent of the Educational Service
Center of Central Ohio, which provides services to local districts and works with their
superintendents.

Harris said today that she has considered retirement for over a year. But she declared in
late December that leaving her job before mid-2014 wasn’t an option: “ There are just many things
that are still on the table working with the board and the community that I would want to
accomplish.”

Harris also landed major accomplishments.

During her tenure, the district never lost a ballot request for increased property-tax
dollars, but an effort to place a levy on this November’s ballot stalled amid the attendance
scandal and other questions.

Under Harris, the district has made modest but steady academic gains. But a cloud hangs over
that accomplishment as well, because data-tampering may have boosted those scores. She steered the
district out of an “F” ranking from the state in two years. The district now has a “C,” a rating it
has held for five years.

Harris is within striking distance of her big goal — a 90 percent graduation rate for this
year's seniors. Based on preliminary data the district has supplied to the state, Columbus'
graduation rate will hit 85.1 percent for the class that graduated last summer.

If that number holds, it would be a gain of 7.5 percentage points over the previous year. The
rate was just over 50 percent when Harris took over.

Harris also has presided over one of the biggest school-building projects in Ohio, as 45
buildings have been either erected or remodeled. She also has navigated the politically charged
process of closing 40 schools.